Misogyny and Auto-Biographical Fiction: The Corbaccio's Ambiguity in Bernat Metge's Lo somni

Giovanni Boccaccio is known as the author of a vast Humanistic work in Latin, as the creator of the Decameron, the first large collection of short stories in vernacular, and as one of the three Crowns, along with Dante and Petrarch, that represent the crossroads between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Boccaccio was an admirer of Dante. He wrote a biography of Dante and a commentary of the Divine Comedy. He was also a friend of Petrarch, with whom he maintained an epistolary relationship and even met in person in 1351 (Branca, The Man 86–96). However, the image that stands behind his creative works in vernacular could not be more different from these two other authors. If Dante's Comedy embodies the ideal fusion of poetry and theology and Petrarch's the Canzoniere is the highest expression of stylistic perfection, Boccaccio has been portrayed as the champion of sensual love and licentiousness (Hollander, Boccaccio's Two Venuses 3). No other proof is needed than the numerous lascivious passages of the Decameron where female characters seem to always find a way to satisfy their sexual appetite while keeping their honor, or the Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, the memories of a young woman who will use any argument to justify her adultery.

The Corbaccio seems to contradict this assumption of Boccaccio's literary production. Written between 1354 and 1366 (Padoan, "Sulla" 199–201), right after or during the composition of the Decameron, this work contains one of the harshest misogynistic diatribes of medieval Romance literatures. In the prologue, the main character, who is also the narrator, calls the work "umile trattato" and thus he suggests that his book does not come without a moral message. In the afterword, he claims that his work should be a warning to those young men who are in love and he begs to keep it out of women's reach. In the middle, this narrator recounts us the vision he has after being scorned by his lover, a middle-aged widow. He finds himself lost in a dark valley when suddenly the spirit of the widow's husband appears to reveal to him the degenerate nature of women and, particularly, that of his old wife. The plot is very simple: a man who has lost his way because of lust will start a spiritual journey towards salvation. This is the same framework of Dante's Vita nuova and Comedy but with a radical change on the argumentation. While Dante focuses on the male lover's weakness to resist sexual temptation, Boccaccio highlights that women play a prominent role in men's damnation by pushing them into sin.

As Hollander pointed out, criticism of the Corbaccio can be divided into three main groups (Boccaccio's Last Fiction 42). The first group includes critics who have read it as an attack against women from the author himself. According to this interpretive line, Giovanni Boccaccio would have presumably had some sort of frustrated love story with a widow when he was past forty, and wrote the Corbaccio to take revenge of her. Critics of the second group distance themselves from any autobiographical reading, but maintain the assumption that Boccaccio would have been completely serious about the misogynistic content of his work. Finally, the third group includes critics claiming that the Corbaccio is neither autobiographical nor a condemnation of women's morality but a parody of misogyny—an act of rejection of those moralists who had attacked the Decameron.

Even though this essay sides with the last group of critics,¹ I need to assert from the beginning that I do not attempt to offer a definitive reading of the Corbaccio. The reason why critics have been coalescing around three different interpretive lines is due to the nature of the work itself. Hollander states that "the Boccaccian narrator is distinguished by being always unreliable or, at best, enigmatic" (Boccaccio's Last Fiction 25). The behavior of Boccaccio's narrators is stated as one thing, but then immediately contradicted by the narrators themselves, who do the opposite...